Confessions of a media tart: how candidate came clean writing for the Guardian

"I am a Guardian columnist," David Cameron announced to a surprised House of Commons when he first stood at the despatch box as a junior shadow minister just over two years ago. It was not what Dennis Skinner expected from a Tory boy. "Eh, bloody 'ell, whatever next," the Labour MP shot back.

But Cameron was telling the truth. The man on the brink of taking over the Tories may be a mystery to his party but users of the Guardian Unlimited website know all about him. From early 2001, when he was just a hopeful parliamentary candidate, to spring 2004, by which time he was deputy chairman of his party, Cameron wrote more than 70 fortnightly online diaries for the Guardian charting his vertiginous political ascent.

"I like to think of my column as a beacon of right thinking in a sea of muddle-headedness," he told the Commons. But it was much more fun than that. Articulate, cheerful and breezily indiscreet, the diaries reflect the ambitions of a young man on the make. "OK, so I'm a media tart," he confessed.

He began in April 2001 with a vision. "There is an iconic figure from the 1970s and 1980s that should inspire the Conservative party this week," he said. Gosh - who? Does she have big hair? "I am of course referring to the hairy godfather of punk rock who recently died of cancer, Joey Ramone."

Disraeli? Palmerston? Macmillan? Has any other future Tory leader begun like this? Soon he tells a tale about visiting a medical supplies company in his constituency. "It markets a new machine called the Rapport, the full description of which is a 'vacuum therapy device for erectile dysfunction'. I will spare you the details (large test tube, small pump, painful looking rubber band)."

He didn't try it out, but by June Cameron had been elected and the Tories were choosing a new leader. "While the papers are full of leadership speculation ... (sob) none of the potential candidates has called to ask for my support," he writes. These days he is doing the calling.

"For future new boys, someone should write a lexicon of leadership-ese. It is just about the only language in the world where two people can say the same thing but mean something entirely different," he warns.

"I pass David Davis in the corridor only for him to say: 'Didn't they tell you there was a recess?' He wouldn't have said that a month ago when he was after my vote". He speaks up for drug law reform as a pioneering member of the home affairs select committee. But "the suggestion that we do a field trip to Amsterdam, however, seems rather old hat. Why not Ibiza to look at ecstasy use?"

"On the drugs issue I am an instinctive liberal," he says. He has stuck to that. But he is less keen on the Tory liberal he has now knocked out of politics, Ken Clarke. "His saloon bar habit of calling his opponents 'headbangers' or 'hangers and floggers' always gives me the shivers."

September 11 2001 changes the tone at Westminster. On Afghanistan, he writes: "I count as a hawk". At the party conference he nearly gets "his big break into live television", only to be dumped "by some young BBC producer. 'Sorry, we don't need you any more, we want someone more rightwing.'"

As a consolation, his local party buys him a "bottle of Anne Summers love oil" as a birthday present. Sex, again. But Cameron is really there to take on Labour. He recalls that as a Tory researcher in 1992 "I vividly remember being pinned to the wall and screamed at by Alastair Campbell". He notes too that "I have only spoken to the prime minister twice in my life (once, when he visited the Home Office, where I was an adviser, was to ask if he wanted tea or coffee).

Blair's reply is unrecorded - but he can't have expected the tea boy to face him across the Commons a decade later. Soon, Cameron's big moment comes: the first prime minister's question. "Throat dry. Chest pounding with anticipation. I had waited for this moment for more than a decade."

It goes well, of course - and so does Cameron's career. Soon he is promoted to the frontbench, then promoted again.

Did he write anything he might regret now? Not much: Cameron is a canny diarist. There is an admission that "an ounce of experience is worth a pound of opinion". Davis and Fox might like to use that. But he admits: "I lack the Jeremy Paxman killer gene."

Cameron on ...

Climbing the greasy pole Whoops, reshuffled again. Last week I was summoned to Michael Howard's office and sat alone for a few brief moments with the great man. After some pleasantries, he uttered the fatal words: "David, I would like you to take on responsibility for local government finance." I have to admit that my first reaction was: "But I thought we were friends?" (March 2004)

Tory unpopularity Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, an academic study is showing that the suicide rate tends to rise during Tory governments. No, seriously. According to the study, if Labour or the Liberals had ruled uninterrupted this century, 35,000 fewer people would have died ... Now we are being branded mass murderers. (September 2001)

Leadership elections Colleagues cosy up to you in the bars and tea rooms to ask which way you are inclined. New boys like me often don't know which camps these individuals are in; they should wear name badges. Camp leaders politely deflate their opponents with well-timed jokes. In the tea room, the gossip is interrupted by the sound of drilling next door. A Portillo stalwart pipes up: "Oh God, another speech by Iain Duncan Smith." Ouch. (July 2001) Joey Ramone There is an iconic figure ... that should inspire the Conservative party ... I am of course referring to the hairy godfather of punk rock. (April 2001)

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